Tuesday, August 15, 2017

"..the Indian framers chose federalism because they were looking for a system that seemed to allow their people to have a say in local government while simultaneously stopping the potentially fractious provinces from pulling apart. In other words, they picked federalism from the menu of constitutional options because they thought it fit their needs and circumstances.Today, federalism seems like such a natural phenomenon that it’s easy to forget it had a moment of invention. That invention involved both theoretical analysis and practical compromise."

Reading a bit of US Constitutional history, one learns that:

"In their attempt to balance order with liberty, the Founders identified several reasons for creating a federalist government:

to avoid tyranny

to allow more participation in politics

to use the states as "laboratories" for new ideas and programs."

If we go back to read what India's constitution framers, we find that:

"The Constitution of India which finally emerged is not Federal in its classic sense but it did contain all the important federal features. As expressed by Dr. B.R Ambedkar, “it is unitary in extra-ordinary circumstances such as war and other calamities and federal under normal circumstances”. An agreement was made in the Constituent Assembly, refusing to accept India as a federation of states, while challenging the motion, Ambedkar wanted to expose the logical weaknesses and practical difficulties of imitating the classical federation like the US by saying that:…though India was to be a federation, the federation was not the result of an agreement by the States to join in a federation, and that the federation not being the result of an agreement, no State has the right to secede from it. The Federation is a Union because it is indestructible. Though the country and the people may be divided into different States for convenience of administration, the country is one integral whole, its people a single people living under a single imperium derived from a single source. The Americans had to wage a civil war to establish that the States have no right of secession and that their federation was indestructible. The Drafting Committee thought that it was better to make it clear at the outset rather than to leave it to speculation or to disputes."

Narendra Modi, has often talked about both competitive and cooperative federalism in his tenure as Prime Minister, including today in his Independence Day Speech. The recently introduced Goods & Service Tax (GST) is perhaps one of the finest examples of cooperative federalism,

Over the years, India's public imagination and thereby media attention has overwhelmingly been occupied by the politics of New Delhi. While this pre-occupation with Delhi centric politics is mainly about the Union Government, it often manifests itself rather amusingly with the amount of disproportionate attention that even the politics of the National Capital Region, Delhi gets when compared to what happens in other states. "Tyranny of Distance" has been glibly used by people to explain away, why the North East of the country gets such little attention and coverage

India's states have exclusive powers on law and order within their jurisdictions and very important powers with respect to health and education. But unfortunately, instead of states being showcased or highlighted for being labs of new ideas and concepts, they rarely get attention apart from the time of elections, or major calamities such as floods or other bad news events such as riots. Public attention is rarely focused on the work of state governments. This needs an urgent correction, as there can be no better, positive, incentive for politicians and bureaucrats at the state level to improve their performance than a constant scrutiny at a nation wide level.

India's federal experiment also faces a number of challenges. We have had nearly 65 years of Centralised Planning for a start, not exactly a great model for federalism to begin with. There are unresolved issues of statehood demands that keep coming up from time to time, Gorkhaland being the most relevant example at the present moment. There are often ham handed efforts by the Centre to spread the use of Hindi, which are then met by backlash in the states, leaving a bad taste in the mouth for most ordinary people. The North-South divide is constantly played up in various forums - from the academic and the journalistic forums in the tendentious discussions around the Aryan Invasion Theory to the recent economic theorizing on disparity between states on tax contributions and returns. Add, to that the general bogey of BJP's hegemony being created by an alarmist liberal media, and what we are likely to see is a more adversarial relationship than required between the Centre and certain states.

As the Indian experiment continues its journey into the 71st year, the country desperately needs high performing state governments, especially in states in the Hindi heartland. And so, by a quirk of fate, one hopes that the two new governments there, who are now bound to get attention for controversial reasons, are both tracked closely and also perform much better than previous administrations.

At the same time, it needs a Center which appears to be restrained and judicious and seen to give the states their dues, especially in an environment where the nation's adversaries are determined to keep playing up India's many fault lines.

India's federal polity needs a lot more focus and attention on states and other local governments. Here's hoping we shall have that soon enough.

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

It's been quite a while since I did a blog post. And while I don't have anything to write on just yet - I thought it is worthwhile to bookmark some fascinating writing and discussion going on in the US on nationalism in the National Review.

Donald Trump's rise to the US Presidency has resulted in conservatives in the United States, doing a lot of self analysis - the meaning of conservatism itself is part of an ongoing debate right now. By any usual measure though - love for one's country - whether called patriotism or nationalism, has been part of almost all conservative, or what we call a right wing, ideology around the world.

Here are some fascinating articles debating these concepts - nationalism and patriotism - all from National Review. If you have an afternoon or evening free and are the patriotic/ nationalistic/ Bharat Mata ki Jai type guy like me, I think it would be time well spent to read these pieces.

Sunday, November 13, 2016

Donald Trump is going to be the next President of the United States of America. Coming close after the surprise Yes vote in the Brexit referendum in the UK, this was yet another shocking blow to the established liberal order in general and the rule of globalised elites in particular.

Whether Trump won due to running a racist, xenophobic, misognynistic campaign or whether he won because he listened to and spoke about the economic anxiety gripping parts of "White" America is going to be debated long and wide. And whether Liberal elites should try to listen to these anxieties rather than mocking these Americans through Late Night comedy shows is another question that will be discussed for a long time to come.

The Alt-Right, Breitbart and what have you, came into prominence as having become a significant part of the Trump campaign. When they began to get featured in the mainstream media, I found this part from Ross Douthart's piece back in April particularly noteworthy:

But while reactionary thought is prone to real wickedness, it also contains real insights.... Reactionary assumptions about human nature — the intractability of tribe and culture, the fragility of order, the evils that come in with capital-P Progress, the inevitable return of hierarchy, the ease of intellectual and aesthetic decline, the poverty of modern substitutes for family and patria and religion — are not always vindicated. But sometimes? Yes, sometimes. Often? Maybe even often.

Both liberalism and conservatism can incorporate some of these insights. But both have an optimism that blinds them to inconvenient truths. The liberal sees that conservatives were foolish to imagine Iraq remade as a democracy; the conservative sees that liberals were foolish to imagine Europe remade as a post-national utopia with its borders open to the Muslim world. But only the reactionary sees both.

Talking of Liberal utopia, Mass Immigration has been and is going to be in the foreseeable future probably the most hotly contested cultural ( & economic ) issue in my opinion. This post in unz.com titled Who Belongs, provides an often easily felt but rarely articulated understanding on how native populations look at immigration. It refers to comments from someone called Michael Ignatieff.

What is driving this surge in anti-immigrant populism in Western politics?

"what we’re seeing is, in part, an ideological split between cosmopolitan elites who see immigration as a common good based in universal rights, and voters who see it as a gift conferred on certain outsiders deemed worthy of joining the community."

This disagreement, he said in an interview, has animated much of the backlash against immigration that is described as “uncontrolled” and a threat to receiving communities. These disagreements over “who belongs,” he said, will “define the 21st century.” …

Now talking of global elites, written in September, well before Trump's unlikely win, Mathew Continenti had explained in this piece titled The Politics of Disassociation, Why populism, nationalism, and tribalism will outlast Trump and Clinton. In the piece, he quotes another article by John Marini and this paragraph is very instructive:

Those most likely to be receptive of Trump are those who believe America is in the midst of a great crisis in terms of its economy, its chaotic civil society, its political corruption, and the inability to defend any kind of tradition—or way of life derived from that tradition—because of the transformation of its culture by the intellectual elites. This sweeping cultural transformation occurred almost completely outside the political process of mobilizing public opinion and political majorities. The American people themselves did not participate or consent to the wholesale undermining of their way of life, which government and the bureaucracy helped to facilitate by undermining those institutions of civil society that were dependent upon a public defense of the old morality.

"How do people who like both equality and diversity square this contradiction? On the most part they don’t, because as Damon Linker observed recently in The Week, they have come to view any attachment to the local and real over the global and abstract as morally deviant:

Underlying liberal denigration of the new nationalism — the tendency of progressives to describe it as nothing but ‘racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia’ — is the desire to delegitimise any particularistic attachment or form of solidarity, be it national, linguistic, religious, territorial, or ethnic… cosmopolitan liberals presume that all particularistic forms of solidarity must be superseded by a love of humanity in general, and indeed that these particularistic attachments will be superseded by humanitarianism before long, as part of the inevitable unfolding of human progress.

Is it any surprise then, that across the western world the centre-left is sleepwalking to irrelevance? The proposition nation is a noble concept, and one against which the white identity politics of the Alt Right is hard to morally articulate, but it is very much a utopian one, and certainly something that has never been tried before in a democracy. Liberals boast that demography is on their side, which it certainly is, but when they achieve their goal they might not like what they have created. The more utopian dreams fail the more virulent its believers tend to become towards opponents, but it doesn’t solve the existential contradictions. As a child, I remember a superpower tried changing human nature to create a paradise on earth; that didn’t work out too well."

PS: This Youtube video rant by Jonathan Pie, that has gone viral is absolutely brilliant :)

Saturday, September 17, 2016

Disclaimer : This is a long and rambling post about a few topics - but mainly intended to think aloud about having an honest and open debate about RTE.

2015 onward, we have seen an outbreak of various kinds of incidents in Europe - both terrorist attacks as well as some non terror ones - like the attack on women in Germany on New Year's eve, which has led all sorts of questions being asked about mass immigration, multiculturalism, integration, the state of of liberal democracy and so on. The Leave vote winning the Brexit referendum only further fueled the ongoing rhetoric. Clearly there is a problem for all to see. The integration of Muslims, especially from the Middle East, Africa and Pakistan is not going very well - I do not need to post five different links here to make that point.

Roll back a few years. Mark Steyn, in an interview on Uncommon Knowledge, had this sequence, which goes into the heart of a tough question. There have been facts as well let's say fear mongering, about the changing nature of European society with lowering birth rates of white Europeans and rising immigration from the Muslim world. The term Eurabia had been mentioned by Steyn and a few others, with some particular date given by which Europe would be a white minority continent. That was vehemently countered by the multicultural left saying - no way that date is right, it would take many more years. But within that is an implied admission that Europe could be on it's way to becoming a Muslim continent. Alright, then the next question is So what ? So what would be wrong if Europe or the West turned Muslim ?

Asking about consequences of demographic changes is a fair question in my opinion and deserves thoughtful answers, whether it is the West or India. Every time the Census data is published in India, the very same data is analysed completely differently by the Left and the Right. For example this time around, the narrative from the Left was that Muslim population growth rates are at their lowest levels ever, while the narrative from the Right was about how the Muslim population growth was higher than that of Hindus again. Both statements were correct factually - but they displayed differing concerns, as well as social/ political agendas.

Same data different analysis

Take this very detailed analysis by Shanmukh, Dikgaj and Saswati Sarkar. It discusses the possibility of Western UP and Southern Uttarakhand turning Muslim majority by 2061. So what ? You might ask. So what if that and indeed, other parts of the country turn Muslim majority - what is the problem, what is the issue ? I think - these are tough questions that deserve a lot of thought and analysis, Maybe there is no problem and any concerns raised are bogus. Or maybe there are questions to be raised about the life and liberty of non Muslims in such areas. Either way, it would be better as a society to answer these questions with clarity, rather than fear mongering or whisper campaigns.

Education

The Education sector is subject to quite vociferous debates across the world. The new Prime Minister of post-Brexit Britain Theresa May, has immediately gone for the restoration of "Grammar Schools" - something not touched by her predecessor David Cameron, who belonged to the same party. Note how she is not ashamed of using the term "truly meritocratic Britain". Of course, the move will not go uncontested, it will face virulent criticism from the Left, but at least there is a debate happening in the public space transparently.

In the United States, Charter Schools are a cause for lot of debates. In this article, the great Thomas Sowell points out how Charter Schools have been delivering better results for the black community but are opposed by the Left and their success stories are ignored by the media because it does not suit their politics.

Whatever the debate, in my opinion there is far more plain speaking on both sides than what we see here in India.

Coming to RTE

We have been seeing a lot of hand wringing over the disastrous consequences of RTE, including it's sectarian nature. Within the last month, the cancellation of affiliation of six prestigious schools of the NPS group in Bengaluru, on account of an attempt to get minority status through fake certificates in order to avoid falling under the RTE regime, has brought some additional media attention.

There have been some criticisms of RTE of a secular nature in the Indian and International media, right up to this column by Geeta Kingdon in The New York Times. Someone the other day described RTE as a legislation which confuses "building schools" with "school buildings". See this video (sadly very under-shared & under-seen) of how a small, private school teaching kids from non-privileged backgrounds had to shut down as it did not comply with some bureaucratic wisdom.

Let's come to the most divisive aspect of RTE which is the sectarian nature of the law. A surprising number of people do not know about this. A more disturbing number of India's public intellectuals, media mavens and journalists PRETEND to not know about this. But basically this is what it means: A combined reading of the Constitutional Amendment (93rd Amendment), the RTE legislation and cases decided by the Supreme Court means that only Hindu owned schools (whether Aided by the govt or Unaided ) have to comply with the regulations of the RTE. Minority owned schools (both Unaided and Aided) are exempt from complying with the RTE regime.

Apart from the plethora of regulations, the big issue here is schools under RTE, that is "HINDU schools", have to reserve 25% of seats for the poor and other categories of children to be reimbursed the state. In other words, the Indian state, which promises free (& compulsory) education to children between the age of 6 to 14, SHIFTS the burden of it's own promise (in part) to private, Hindu schools only. Experience of the last few years tells us that many schools are shutting down as state governments are often not fully footing the bill or delaying the payment etc etc. The disadvantages that a Hindu school faces vis-a-vis say a non Hindu school are an enormous additional burden when it comes to be a competitive player of school market.Reality Check India(RCI), has been pretty much leading the fight on Social Media to spread awareness on this issue. His blogs are an absolute education on this subject (and on many else). I would recommend anyone interested in knowing more about the disastrous RTE to read his posts on the topic.

At the very least, if you explain this much to any reasonable individual, he or she will probably agree that something is not right here, at least in terms of a fair competition between say Hindu schools and Catholic schools - the Hindu schools are at a substantial disadvantage, whether it is in terms of autonomy or finance. The financial disadvantage is probably getting passed on to balance 75% students.

So, where is there so much silence about this in the mainstream media ? Why are India's public intellectuals who are up in arms against Gau-Rakshaks largely silent about this gross unfairness and inequality before law ? Why is no one doing plain speaking like Shreyas Bharadwaj did in this article where he mentions the following:

The RTE is nothing less than a targeted tax on Hindus already running schools and a preventive tax on Hindus from entering into the education sector. A 21st century version of Jizya.

(SO WHAT, you may ask, later ....)

How does such an incredibly unfair law stay on the books with very little awareness or debate out there in the real world ? Is there a remotely similar situation in the education sector of any country which dis-advantages the majority community so severely ? I haven't come across any such examples. I am not totally surprised -after all the Indian state is unique in shifting the burden of responsibility to the private sector with great innovation. The 2% of profit for compulsory CSR for corporates was also a World's first when it was brought in a few years back.

But amending, let alone repealing RTE, if ever any government - gets into that mode, will be an extremely onerous journey. The path will be filled with massive obstacles led by the activist classes who make up our so called "civil society" and then dealing with an increasingly difficult judiciary. There are moral hazards to be encountered in every step of the way, every clause to overturn. Take some examples.

Repeal RTE for Hindu schools: All hell would break lose if someone tried to do it one shot and it is here that we will get into some really deep ethical quagmires ? Do you not want good education for the underprivileged kids of the society ? These are Hindu kids also - you want to block their growth? You will hear plenty of goading from Catholic educationists for eg - who will go - We are fine if you Hindus don't want to educate your kids.This is the diabolical genius of the RTE legislation for it has now pit Hindus on two opposing sides and you can never make everyone happy at the same time ever again.

No Detention: If you cite falling standards of educational outcome and learning and link it to removing no detention - then you will get some activists saying that schools are actually safe spaces for children from under-privileged backgrounds first and foremost and by bringing this in - you are actually attempting to thrown them out of school in a few years. In case the BJP tries this - they will be accused of doing an about turn on their own policy in Maharashtra. In any case today, meritocracy in India has been already sold as a Brahmanical conspiracy and this will be just another part of that agenda.

Requirements of physical infrastructure: If you try to make them less stringent - you will be encountered by jibes of how you are inhuman to think schools should not have toilets for girl students.

The challenges I narrate are just as I scratch the surface. Experts and Intellectuals will no doubt weigh in with many more difficulties. There will be more moral hazards unearthed. There will be more Zero Sum Games to lose sleep over.

Asking for equality before law should be a simple exercise, it is generally considered to be a foundation of rule of law. But in India's current legal and political system, pitting one group against the other, pitting one special interest group against another is the norm and so there are no guarantees based on common sense and basic principles.

And so to end, something about plain speaking about the consequences of doing nothing and the status quo.

It appears to me that in the current state of discourse, the activist among the parents would rather be protest against high fees of a private school and get it under govt control, than have an education market of choice.

What is the average Indian middle class parent most concerned about ? Is it RTE or rising school fees ? It is the latter. When you explain it him - what does he say ? He says hmm, we will still have the good missionary schools left unaffected - we will send our kids there. So what he will ask you - let the poor Hindus be educated through RTE and the elite go to the excellent Missionary schools. Hasn't the elite always gone to these excellent Missionary schools. What is the problem now ?

This is the question that needs to be answered. Well this is the elite that gives you today's self appointing judiciary and today's media. It is the same elite class that has nationalized the Hindu religion. Do we want more of the same or do we want a change for the better and equality before law ?

I do concede that better policy alternatives need to be formulated in detail, but plain, honest, truthful speaking is needed from all sides. I guess what I am also saying is just stating the obvious like Equality before law is needed, may not be enough anymore. We need to engage in Sustained Persuasion. Doing nothing about this is not an option we can afford.